Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (21 page)

In October 1937 Chiang’s government began its westward march, relocating its military command to Wuhan, and the administration to Chongqing. A Reuters report from late November reported the gloomy scene: “In a steady downpour the evacuation of the Chinese Government was almost completed to-day. Offices and factories are now being stripped of all valuable equipment . . . If the city is taken it will be only an empty shell.” The report did add that “there is absolutely no sign of civil disorder or impending collapse. The general opinion among the Chinese is a resolute determination to carry on resistance, and feeling against capitulation is very strong.”
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Chiang was aware of that feeling. His priority now was to defend central China. But even though the coastal regions were given up for lost once Shanghai fell, Chiang felt he could not leave the east of his country until the last possible moment. He knew that the abandonment of the capital was a devastating blow to the prestige of his regime, and his public statements remained defiant. “It is our fixed policy to resist to the last inch and to the last man,” he declared on November 25.
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Nanjing held immense cultural resonance for all Chinese. Until 1421 the city had been China’s capital under the Ming dynasty. Its great city walls had taken over twenty years to build with the labor of 200,000 workers, and they towered above Nanjing as a symbol of imperial power. Even after the capital moved to Beijing, the city was renowned for its fine architecture and the gracious lifestyle of its merchant class. Nanjing had also been the Taiping capital during the bloody civil war of 1850–1864. The city came to prominence again starting in 1928, when it had become the national capital under Chiang’s government. The Nationalists used the city to project a vision of urban modernity that would rival the great colonial city of Shanghai. A mighty boulevard named after Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan Road) was bulldozed through the city’s ancient center; grand pillared government buildings were thrown up to house ministries; and plans were made—never fulfilled—for a new party headquarters that would combine features of the Temple of Heaven in Beijing and the US Capitol building. Beautification began with the planting of trees on the city’s main streets. (Even today it is one of the few Chinese cities that benefits from the shade and greenery of trees.)
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Nanjing became a symbol of the kind of environmental and technological modernity that the Nationalists desired for all of China. Much of this remained a dream. By the late 1930s the economic crisis meant that large building projects were difficult to fund. And when war broke out, Nanjing’s status changed from a capital city at the heart of the Nationalists’ project of renewal to a place terribly vulnerable to invasion.

The Japanese high command had not initially intended to capture Nanjing. When fighting broke out in northern China, the Japanese were mainly concerned with consolidating their grip there, rather than taking over the areas under Nationalist control. But Chiang’s decision to widen the war by opening up a front in the Yangtze valley forced the Japanese to rethink their plans. They set up a new entity, the Central China Area Army (CCAA), which was established in some haste on November 7, 1937. The CCAA was the product of two preexisting forces, the Japanese Tenth Army and the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, and its formation reflected the rapidly changing nature of Japan’s campaign in the region. From the start of the war in July, the Japanese had hoped to use one forceful strike to eliminate Chinese resistance. But the escalation of the war surprised them, as did the determination of the defending Chinese forces. Although the landing of Tenth Army troops at Hangzhou Bay just south of Shanghai on November 5 proved an important turning point, contributing strongly to the Japanese victory at Shanghai, the Japanese took many more casualties than they had expected, some 42,202 killed and wounded.
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Indeed, Nanjing was never a strategic target for the Japanese. Shanghai gave them mastery over China’s greatest port. The capture of Nanjing was purely a matter of symbolic power. By taking the capital, the Japanese would finally demonstrate their victory over Chinese nationalism, a force they considered pernicious and alien to their vision of East Asia’s future. “Unless the Nanking Government reconsiders its attitude and ceases its resistance,” declared General Matsui Iwane, “Japanese troops will continue to advance to Nanking, Hankow, and even Chungking, China’s new capital.” From Matsui’s viewpoint, shared by others in the Japanese leadership, the apathetic European powers were somehow propping China up, and only the Japanese had China’s true interests at heart:

The first point is to make the Nanking Government abandon the policy of depending on European countries and America . . . The second point is to make the Chinese people recognize that Japanese troops are the real friends of China, and have been sacrificing themselves in the current incident to rescue 400,000,000 Chinese correcting the latter’s misconceptions brought about by the anti-Japanese policy pursued by the Nanking Government.
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The idea that the Nationalist government was “dependent” on Europe or America was a reference to the way that Chiang’s government had tried to counter the threat from Japan before 1937 by seeking support from the Western powers, although those powers remained reluctant to offer much substantial help. It was also, more broadly, a recognition that China had started to participate in a world where transnational organizations such as the League of Nations were trying to overcome the frictions caused by bilateral conflicts between countries.
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Japan regarded China as its backyard, and these developments were deeply unwelcome.

Most foreigners had left Nanjing by early autumn. Embassies evacuated their staff, companies sent their employees home. One of those who stayed on was John Rabe, a German businessman working for the Siemens Corporation.
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The German noted that by mid-October most of the hotels, shops, and all the cinemas in Nanjing had already closed.
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For most foreigners, this had been a signal that it was time to leave, but Rabe was one of a small group of foreigners who decided they must do something to help the Chinese population left behind by the Nationalists. Aside from Rabe himself, these foreigners included Nanjing University professor Lewis Smythe; Minnie Vautrin, missionary and director of studies at the Ginling Women’s College; and George Fitch, head of the city’s YMCA. This group decided that in the event of a Japanese capture of Nanjing, they would establish an International Safety Zone that would be deemed neutral and that Chinese who sheltered there would be safe.
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Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the idea, and even offered 100,000 dollars to support the Zone (although only 40,000 dollars was ever paid).
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Tang Shengzhi, the general whom Chiang had placed in charge of the last-ditch defense of Nanjing, was also in favor. The Japanese, however, found the idea unacceptable. They suspected that the Zone would become a hiding place for Chinese soldiers defending the city. Tang confirmed these fears when he made it clear that Chinese troops would be stationed in the Zone, and that trenches and defenses would be drawn up around it.
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By early December, Shanghai had fallen. Chiang knew that the abandonment of the capital would be seen around the world as a humiliation for his government. He had to withdraw to the interior, but he wanted to make it clear that the capital had died hard, and that troops had fought to the last man. It was not just a matter of honor, but also of good public relations. If China could not provide victories, it could at least provide an impressive narrative of its courage.

As November turned into December, Chiang made last-ditch attempts to prevent what now seemed like the inevitable fall of Nanjing. He cabled Stalin, asking him to dispatch troops to help China; Stalin, who had no intention of launching a land war in China, refused. Chiang’s distrust of the Soviets, and the CCP by implication, increased. On December 6 Wang Jingwei held talks with the German ambassador, Oskar Trautmann, hoping to mediate a peace agreement, but it came to nothing. On that day Chiang assessed his chances: Japanese arms were superior, the Chinese forces were weak, and morale within Nanjing had already been destroyed.
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At 4:00 a.m. on December 7, Chiang rose and said his prayers. At 5:00 a.m. he and his wife left the doomed capital by airplane. They flew first southward to Nanchang, in Jiangxi province, and then on to Lushan. The situation left Chiang “broken-hearted.”
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He made it clear that the city must fight to the last. But he had always been a strategist, and his first instinct was not to think about the city he had abandoned but to calculate what should happen next. In the planning notes in his diary Chiang reflected on the need for a “wartime educational strategy” as well as a “national mobilization plan.” The most important thing, he felt, was that the Nationalist Party “must not lose its revolutionary spirit.” These reflections may seem almost willfully optimistic in the face of the disaster that Chiang had just left behind. But they surely helped him cope with the horrors that had been visited on China so far. By proposing education, or any other social policy, Chiang was able to build up the idea that the War of Resistance was a positive enterprise, aiming to reconstruct a nation, not merely a terrified flight into the interior before an all-conquering enemy.

He also invoked “revolutionary spirit” because he knew that there were other claimants for the term’s prestige. If communism were permitted to gain a hold, he wrote on December 11, then “China could become a second Spain.” Many Western progressives saw the wars in Spain and in China as linked, both being examples of progressive forces being attacked by reactionaries and fascists.
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However, Chiang’s thinking was in many ways close to Franco’s. For Chiang, the civil war in Spain showed how communism could use national disunity to infiltrate itself into power. Spain also gave Chiang another melancholy parallel. As he left Nanjing, he was not at all hopeful about the prospect of swift intervention by the foreign powers. He thought, with some prescience, that it was likely to come after three years of “hard struggle” by China on its own.

Even if he had wanted to put Nanjing’s fate behind him, Chiang could not just forget the city. Since the outbreak of fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge in July, Chiang had spent five exhausting months in eastern China trying to defend the region against Japan. For a man who identified his own fate with that of China as a whole, the loss of his capital, the seat of his hopes and dreams for the Nationalist government, was deeply wrenching. On the morning of December 14, Chiang traveled on a commandeered pleasure steamer down to Lushan, where he gave a speech on the reasons for the retreat from Nanjing. From there, he flew to Wuhan, the new headquarters of the Nationalist military command. He was full of plans: refugee relief for people who had had to flee Nanjing; a complete restructuring of the military command. The only thing his diary does not record in those days immediately after his departure are any thoughts on what might be happening in the capital he had left behind.
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The man who volunteered to take charge of Nanjing’s last stand was General Tang Shengzhi, yet another “ally” with whom Chiang had an ambivalent and complicated relationship during China’s turbulent warlord era. Tang was from Hunan, the prosperous and restive province in central China that was also the birthplace of Mao Zedong. In the 1920s Tang had switched sides more than once, joining the National Revolutionary Army in its Northern Expedition to unify China, then turning against Chiang, before backing him again. Of course, other prominent leaders, including Wang Jingwei and Feng Yuxiang, had acted similarly. Now, Chiang had to work out how to fight a war against Japan while the loyalty of his own leaders was in question. This prompted him to place commanders in positions where their loyalty and willingness to fight would have to be tested in public. Chiang’s tactics also drove him to place less well-trained troops in hopeless positions, such as the defense of Nanjing. As a result, the very best troops from Chiang’s own Central Army, along with the Guangxi troops of Li Zongren, were preserved for battles that could actually be won during the long war. But this was of little comfort to the commanders and soldiers who had to fight when there was no chance of success. Tang was now in a nearly impossible position: he was in effect being asked to conduct a suicide mission, or else be publicly disgraced.

By the second week of December 1937, the atmosphere described by the few foreigners who remained in Nanjing was unnatural in the extreme. John Rabe, half ironically, noted in his diary on December 8 that he was now effectively the mayor of Nanjing, because the actual mayor, Ma Zhaoqun, had left the city the day before. The Chinese military, however, continued to dig in and give every impression of wanting to defend the city to the last man. F. Tillman Durdin, who reported for the
New York Times
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Opposed to the Japanese forces as they closed in on Nanking were a number of Cantonese divisions, a few Kwangsi [Guangxi] troops, some Hunanese and—within the city itself—the Thirty-sixth and the Eighty-eighth Divisions and a number of other so-called Nanking divisions. The Cantonese troops had been decimated by weeks of shelling as they retreated before the Japanese from around Shanghai.

The Thirty-sixth and Eighty-eighth Divisions, former crack troops of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had been badly shattered around Shanghai. Withdrawn to Nanking, they had been replenished with raw recruits.
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